Snipi closes second angel round, brings total raised to $1.4 million

Center City-based startup Snipi, a Web-based shopping and aggregation tool, has closed a second round of angel funding bringing its total raised to just over $1.4 million.
CEO and Founder Andre Golsorkhi would not disclose the amount raised in the second round, but said in a telephone interview that it is funded by original investors and partially from a new set of angels.
Golsorkhi says that Snipi has quintupled registrations in the past six months and has added new features that improve engagement. The service launched as a public beta in May and saw 5,000 registrations in its first month of public availability, as we reported.
The company has also added ticket marketplace StubHub co-founder Colin Evans to its Board of Advisers. Evans is now the Founder and Managing Partner of Sandwith Ventures, a Philadelphia- and Bay Area-based venture capital firm focused on angel and early-stage investments. StubHub was acquired by Ebay in an estimated $310 million deal, as TechCrunch reported in January 2007.
Golsorkhi says that the addition of Evans to the Board of Advisers is not an indication that he’s an investor. “StubHub and Snipi fundamentally share some similarities in the way that they penetrate distribution opportunities. It made sense to have someone like him helping and advising us,” he says.
Snipi provides tools, like a Firefox toolbar extension, that lets users save and share products and Web content while they browse. Users can drag and drop product photos and information, video and more to a hosted Snipi profile page. There’s also an iPhone application for the service.
Consumers are constantly looking for new products in between purchases, Golsorkhi told Technically Philly in May, or becoming more involved in communities related to their buys afterward. Snipi was developed to analyze the gap between customer purchases, in order to eventually sell that anonymous mid-level data to publishers and retailers. No individuals that use the service are ever personally identifiable, Golsorkhi says.
The service also recently launched Snipi Streams, which lets users capture content on the Web and output it to an embeddable page widget, the Snipi iPhone application or RSS feed. Users can keep the streams to themselves, share with others, or collaborate on content.
Watch a video tutorial of Streams. Story continues below…
http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=6645852&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=&fullscreen=1
Snipi will use the second round of funding to develop an Internet Explorer version of the Snipi Toolbar, and the company plans to release a public API in the next six weeks that will allow developers to aggregate data from the toolbar to third-party destinations.
The startup has also announced a strategic partnership with online photo and video retailer B&H, which hosts 3.5 million to 4.0 million unique monthly visitors. Golsorkhi says that the retailer has shown a commitment to social media.
“This is even riskier than investing in Twitter and Facebook. These guys are going a little bit further. It’s an important indicator of things,” he says.